Two congressional bills addressing antisemitism in education have drawn support from across the political spectrum.
As reports of antisemitic activities continue across college campuses, these new measures aim to offer two federal responses following last year’s failure to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act.
In November, Florida Republican Rep. Randy Fine introduced the No Antisemitism in Education Act, which seeks to broadly define antisemitism and require federally funded schools to treat it equal to racism.
In mid-December, the Protecting Students on Campus Act was reintroduced by five members of Congress, led by Rep. Lois Frankel, a Florida Democrat.
The bill would require the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, or a partner nonprofit, to launch a “public awareness campaign regarding the availability of all rights provided to individuals” under Title VI. It also would require congressional hearings on reports of discrimination, and audits by the department’s Inspector General.
The bill and its Senate companion have been introduced several times in Congress prior to Rep. Frankel’s move. In 2024 and 2025, Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and John Fetterman (D-PA) introduced the bill in the Senate, and Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC) introduced a House counterpart.
Each time, the bill received supportive statements from the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Congress, who said Rep. Frankel’s bill ensures “real transparency” and “critical accountability,” respectively.
Rep. Frankel’s bill is also supported by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Jewish Federations of North America.
None of those organizations or Congress members supporting the bill responded to requests for comment from The College Fix.
Rep. Fine’s bill is modeled on bipartisan legislation he helped pass in Florida. Fine has introduced similar federal bills addressing antisemitism by defining the term and treating it equal with racism.
The bill requires federally funded institutions from elementary schools to universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, a news release from the lawmaker states.The IHRA definition describes antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”
“Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities,” the definition adds.
The bill notes that the term “antisemitism” does not include criticism of Israel “that is similar to criticism towards any other country.”
Legal scholar Ilya Shapiro told The Fix he sees the bill as a step in the right direction.
“The bill is helpful because it fleshes out the definition of antisemitism and gives specificity to what constitutes discrimination on that basis. More statutory language is almost always helpful, rather than leaving it to courts to interpret gaps,” he said.
“For example, [if] someone objects to the existence of Israel but not any other country in the world, that’s a pretty good indication of antisemitism. Criticizing Israeli policy and politicians is fair game—it’s practically Israel’s national sport—but questioning the very idea of Jewish self-determination is by definition antisemitic,” he said via email.
On its website, IHRA states its definition is “non-legally binding.” When the Antisemitism Awareness Act was introduced, civil rights groups including the ACLU objected to its use of the IHRA definition.
“The IHRA working definition,” the group said, “is overbroad. It equates protected political speech with unprotected discrimination, and enshrining it into regulation would chill the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
When asked whether the definition imperiled the bill, Shapiro disagreed with the ACLU.
“That’s not a radical outlier,” he said of the definition, “but the gold standard accepted by scholars of all ideological stripes. And contrary to some commentary, it doesn’t cover teaching the New Testament, criticizing the Israeli government, and the like.”
The bill does not violate the First Amendment, he said.
“We’re a litigious society and preventing antisemitism is unfortunately controversial, so I’m sure that if it were enacted, the bill would be challenged in court,” he said.
“First Amendment challenges would be fruitless because the bill targets discriminatory actions, not speech.”
In a statement provided to The College Fix, Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, an international nonpartisan education organization that supports Israel and fights antisemitism, echoed similar sentiments.
She said “the widely-accepted IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism … sheds light on important aspects of anti-Jewish bigotry without restricting or punishing anyone’s speech.”
According to The Daily Signal, when introducing an earlier bill adopting the IHRA definition, “Fine was clear that the bill would ‘restrict people’s ability to say whatever they want’ on college campuses in the same way ‘you can’t say whatever you want about women or black students or gay students or anybody else.'”
The Protecting Students on Campus Act does not adopt the IHRA definition, instead focusing on existing Title VI protections for Jewish students.
Rep. Frankel cited recent events such as the Bondi Beach shooting in Australia as motivation for acting now, while Rep. Fine pointed to “an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything in our lifetimes.”
But others take a more cautious approach.
When voting against congressional condemnations of antisemitism, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) criticized the efforts as “equat[ing] anti-Zionism with antisemitism,” a sentiment Vice President JD Vance recently echoed when he said “there’s a difference between not liking Israel . . . and anti-semitism.”
Shapiro responded in an X post by saying that difference exists “in theory but not in practice.”
Yet when the Antisemitism Awareness Act was voted upon, 21 House Republicans voted against the bill, which included the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The bill stalled in the Senate.
Rothstein told The Fix that even before the Hamas terror attack in Oct. 7, 2023, “StandWithUs has responded to thousands of reports of antisemitism from Jewish and pro-Israel students and faculty facing marginalization in the classroom, the spread of misinformation and hateful rhetoric by student and faculty groups, relentless Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns, and lack of corrective action from administrators.”
“We are grateful that the new administration and Congress have made it a priority to address campus antisemitism,” she said. “Congress should follow up its Title VI awareness campaign by requiring all educational institutions receiving federal funds to create their own Title VI offices.”
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